This invention relates generally to a method and an engine of performance monitoring in a data processing environment. The invention relates further to a computer system, a data processing program, and a computer program product.
Systems management tools play an important role in today's management of data centers, complex computer system structures and distributed computer systems. Modern systems management may involve one or more of the following exemplary tasks: hardware inventories, server availability monitoring and metrics, software inventory and installation, anti-virus and anti-malware management, user's activities monitoring, capacity monitoring, security management and monitoring, storage management and monitoring, network capacity and utilization monitoring, and anti-manipulation management. In particular, in cloud computing environments, monitoring an overall performance of systems is a very important task of system administrators. Systems management tools with special regard to performance monitoring are usually focusing on the entity of one single system. System programmers and performance experts can connect to multiple systems one by one and in parallel for analyzing their preferred metric or parameter values per individual system. Software agents may collect single performance parameters and relate them to the computer system the value was measured in. In a data center's world with an exploding number of virtual resources, cross system performance monitoring becomes a competitive advantage.
Several approaches have been followed in order to address performance evaluation in computing environments. Document U.S. Pat. No. 7,831,708 B2 discloses a method to aggregate evaluation of at least one metric across a plurality of resources. It may include determining an aggregate evaluation of a selected metric for a group of resources of the plurality of resources. The method may also include adjusting the aggregate evaluation of the selected metric in response to any evaluation criteria and determining if any predetermined thresholds have been violated.
Document U.S. Pat. No. 7,689,628 B2 discloses a monitoring system that enables a user to specify multiple resource elements as a resource pool, and view various aggregate information for attributes of interest for all resource elements together. Such a feature may be used in distributed environments where multiple independent resource elements need to be viewed as a single resource pool. The user is provided the flexibility to select the specific resource elements to be included in the resource pool.
Document U.S. Pat. No. 7,480,647 B1 discloses a system and method for monitoring, gathering and aggregating performance metrics of a plurality of members configured as an entity. Configurable performance metric settings can be set at a first computer and dynamically propagated to all members of the entity to establish performance metric configuration settings at each of the plurality of members.